The Top 5 Things you Missed at Shop.org

By Jen Burns on September 14, 2012

If you’ve ever been to a tradeshow, you know that universal themes typically emerge among business leaders. At this year’s Annual Shop.org summit, keynote speakers from companies like Google, Facebook, and several others covered hot topics like omni-channel, personalization, ecommerce checkout and even management, with their best business insight and practices for success. Here are the top 5 takeaways from SHOP 2012:Product is king. Michael Zeisser, SVP of Liberty Media Corp, reported on companies emerging(past and future) and his top tactics for success. Michael explained that without a strong product, it’s impossible for companies to succeed. Companies can run into trouble when they don’t engineer the product around user insights.It’s all about loyalty. Facebook, Google and ShopRunner discussed retail in terms of a social, search and retail perspective. Amazon’s tactics, mentioned several times by Mike Golden from ShopRunner, were necessary for today’s retailers to implement into their customer experience. Facebook’s –Mike Fox discussed the “Facebook experience” and how it will highlight those users who aid in discovery and formulate the most interesting content in user feeds. This in turn will act as a demand generator for retailers on Facebook.Mobile matters more. Like social a couple years back, mobile was a topic in practically every keynote session (and if it wasn’t people may have doubted you). Facebook has dedicated a lot of resources to mobile. When discussing Facebook’s strategic plans for the future, Mike Fox said “If it doesn’t work on mobile, we’re probably not going to take it on in the short term.”People want frictionless check out. Google representative, Sameer Samat, stated “we know that better search engines on retail websites help conversions.” Google is not in the dark when it comes to relevant search (spending billions of dollars on it annually). In addition to search, personalization is a large component to the customer shopping experience and Google is dedicating resources to that fact.Management 2.0 is here and necessary. In addition to product differentiation, Michael Zeisser covered several topics from the original Internet companies’ successes and failures to the shift from in managerial thinking, “management 2.0” as Michael put it. In today’s work environment, community is fostered over hierarchy. Yet, community alone isn’t the only change that management 2.0 encompasses. Business goals, culture, skill sets and decisions today require employees to think fast, innovate quickly and stay ahead of the curve. By forming a network, “every time a new user joins, it makes the network better, richer, more effective.”